Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy is running ads to recruit experienced attorneys because her office can't keep young lawyers past their first few years — and the exodus means the people who depend on functional courts are getting shortchanged.
This isn't a staffing hiccup. It's a structural collapse. Worthy admitted the office has flipped from a career destination to a revolving door. "It used to be people became prosecutors, they stayed for their whole career, and when I started, most of the people around had 15-20 years of experience, and now it's just the opposite," Worthy told CBS News. When the people prosecuting crimes have no experience and no incentive to stay, the system that ordinary Americans rely on for safety and accountability degrades.
Worthy's solution is an ad campaign targeting attorneys with three to four years of experience who are already "courtroom-ready" — an explicit acknowledgment that the office can no longer develop talent from within. "We have our younger lawyers who are trying our lower-level cases that we're training, and so we really want to find people who can walk into a courtroom and just have at it," Worthy said. Translation: the training pipeline is broken, so they're shopping for lawyers someone else already trained.
Worthy claims the campaign, running for a few months, has generated inquiries and a few hires meeting the criteria. She called the video "very successful" and will advocate for funding to continue the approach at this week's budget hearing. But an ad campaign doesn't fix why people leave. It treats the symptom.
The assignment angle from the editor points to progressive reform as the culprit — that the soft-on-crime agenda makes prosecutor offices inhospitable to people who actually want to prosecute. CBS News framed this as a creative recruitment story with a cheerful headline about a "unique approach." They buried the implication: a major urban prosecutor's office has lost its ability to retain staff, and no one in power is asking why. The word "turnover" appears once. The structural reasons behind it — pay, morale, policies that discourage prosecution — go unexamined.
When experienced prosecutors walk and rookies don't stay long enough to become experienced, cases get pled down, victims get ignored, and criminals face less resistance. That's not a glitch. That's a system working exactly as designed for everyone except the public.
The open question: Worthy will ask for budget money to keep running ads. Will anyone ask where the money went that should have kept attorneys in the first place — and what policies drove them out?
